You can't have harvest be a problem when you don't harvest any fish. Look at the Chum runs in the Tillamook district. I constantly refer back to the Nehalem as an indicator stock for wild steelhead. There are multilple reasons, but the best one is the lack of disruption from man. it is as pure as it can get. This River has good years and it has bad ones.
The Nehalem has been and is being logged to holy hell. It has major recent landslides in important spawning areas and has a railroad bed simplifying half the channel of its most important trib. It has fatally warm temperatures along much of its length during summer and has had frequent record flooding events recently from all the disruption (logging). Recently, the Oregon Board of Forestry decided they weren't logging enough, so they increased the boardfeet targets and acreage open to clear-cutting. The upper river has sedimentation problems from farming.
The 2 things the Nehalem doesn't have are hatchery fish for the last few decades or any netting that I'm aware of.
It is an intersting river to compare to and does have a decent native steelhead run, but it always disturbs me to walk along its mainstem, staring at the gravel beds, knowing the reason I don't see any redds is because the fry can't survive the summers there any more. Oh, what it must have been like before we screwed it up!
BTW, the Native Fish Society had a good article on the Nehalem in their summer newsletter, which I believe is available to view on their web site:
www.nativefishsociety.org
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